capsule review

There’s a certain thrill in loving out-of-print authors. There’s the feeling of being in on a great secret, plus the hunt for their books in used bookstores is intoxicating. But it sure is nice to be able to easily get what you want, too. That’s why I’m so thrilled that Penguin Classics has reprinted Thomas Ligotti’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe in one easy-to-obtain paperback.

Ligotti’s prose is wonderfully byzantine, like Lovecraft or Poe, but his work has a contemporary, postmodern feel, too. His stories “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story” and “The Library of Byzantium” are absolutely fantastic in their stimulating intellectuality, on top of being creepy, and now easy-to-locate can be added to his stories’ descriptors, too.

#WeekofSpoop: Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe was last modified: October 30th, 2015 by Quincy Rhoads

In the endnotes, mangaka Junji Ito discusses his (10-year) hiatus from horror comics and tentatively asserts that he’s “got [his] sense for horror back”. Sorry to disagree, Ito-san, but this collection of horror shorts falls, well, short of surreal masterpieces like Uzumaki and Gyo. (For Ito at his ontological best, try the one-shot short “The Enigma of Amigara Fault.”) Readers of his entire ouevre will find more in common with his juvenilia (Tomie was first published in the author’s early twenties), particularly in their urban legend/folktale structure and obsessive reliance on the femme fatale as ultimate source of evil. (There’s even a callback to the author’s roots in Tomio, a recurring male character whose repeated flings with gorgeous witches have predictably dire results.)

It’s not all bad, just disappointing for those of us who’ve seen his best. The climax of “Wooden Spirit” (a bizarre tale about a woman who’s sexually obsessed with a historic house) and “Red Turtleneck” (unfaithful Tomio struggles to keep his severed head attached to his body) show that Ito is still a master of grotesquerie when he puts his mind to it, while the standouts of the collection prove to be the quiet, melancholy tales like “Gentle Goodbye” (a family whose fervent prayers preserve the slowly fading “echoes” of deceased loved ones) and “Whispering Woman” (tracking the increasingly reciprocal link of dependence between a girl who’s unable to make decisions for herself and her governess, a woman trapped in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship). As for the rest, “Blackbird” is nightmarish and byzantine, “Magami Nanasuke” is absurd but ineffectively translated, and “Futon” and “Dissection-chan” are good ideas inexpertly executed.

–Reviewed by Byron Campbell

There’s only a week left until Halloween! In addition to the #VERYSCARY series, we’ll be featuring some capsule reviews this week of some of the spookier books that have come out this year to get you prepped for the best day of the year.

Byron Alexander Campbell is an aspiring human living in Southern California. He is interested in games, story, and the surprising ways they intersect.

#WeekofSpoop: Fragments of Horror was last modified: October 30th, 2015 by Quincy Rhoads

Here’s a book that’s a lot better in theory than in practice. Written by somebody who clearly knows the horror of working retail, Horrorstör transplants the usual “ghosts with a grudge” story into a novel setting: Orsk, a faux-Scandinavian furniture superstore somewhat spoiled by the fact that it exists in the same universe as the real IKEA, which Grady is obviously parodying. (The conceit that Orsk is an IKEA “me-too” run by a WalMart-like American conglomerate instantly rings false, as do the out-of-place Britishisms embedded in the store’s punny product names and corporate slogans.)

The book is at its best when it is skewering retail culture and the vast gulf that exists between corporate think tanks and the actual people forced to carry out their inane policies. Hendrix attempts to enhance this satire by leveraging a rather uninspired horror trope: as it turns out, the store was built on the site of a Puritanical prison/torture dungeon, and the ghosts of both prisoners and warden walk the showroom floor after dark. His message gets a little muddled in the process, but while the ghost story that dominates the second half of the book is nothing new, it’s at least entertainingly written in a Stephen King meets Christopher Moore kind of way.

–Reviewed by Byron Campbell

There’s only a week left until Halloween! In addition to the #VERYSCARY series, we’ll be featuring some capsule reviews this week of some of the spookier books that have come out this year to get you prepped for the best day of the year.

Byron Alexander Campbell is an aspiring human living in Southern California. He is interested in games, story, and the surprising ways they intersect.

#WeekofSpoop: Horrorstör was last modified: October 29th, 2015 by Quincy Rhoads

The Art of Horrible People
by John Skipp
Lazy Fascist Press, 2015
176 pages / $12.95 Buy from Amazon

John Skipp’s The Art of Horrible People functions as an anti-pretension manifesto. The snobs in his stories, be they from Hollywood or the art scene, are savaged brutally in his bare-bones prose. These are plot-driven, blood-drenched stories where women pack heat, Eldritch worms run the film business, and everyone is clambering to make sacrifices to The Devil. True, there are some more philosophical moments, as in “Worm Central Tonite!” as our worm narrator contemplates human existence as he feeds on optical nerves, but Skipp seems far more focused on depicting new kills and premises each more gory than the last over more substantive commentary. As much as I love smart, deconstructive horror and reading fiction experimenting with innovative forms, it’s refreshing to read a throwback to a bygone splatterpunk era like The Art of Horrible People. It may not be performing any literary acrobatics,but nihilistic gore can be just as satisfying at times.

There’s only a week left until Halloween! In addition to the #VERYSCARY series, we’ll be featuring some capsule reviews this week of some of the spookier books that have come out this year to get you prepped for the best day of the year.

#WeekofSpoop: The Art of Horrible People was last modified: October 26th, 2015 by Quincy Rhoads

Good news! The Welcome to Night Vale novel is just like the podcast. Bad news: The Welcome to Night Vale novel is just like the podcast. The podcast is amazing, absurdist fun, but what makes it work is that it’s broken up into digestible, thirty-minute chunks. The novel still maintains the same fun, absurd charm as the show, but the sort of repetitious jokes which would be funny in audio format are turgid when presented in prose. The novel is still worth reading if you’re a fan of the podcast, though. I found the plotline involving Diane and her teenage son, Josh, a shapeshifter who spends an affecting driving lesson scene as a wolf spider, especially poignant. The 1-2 punch of pathos followed by a joke works well enough, but I’m unconvinced that that’s enough to really draw in and hold a reader that’s never heard or enjoyed the podcast before. Thus, I don’t think this book will function as anything more than ephemera for an already cultish audience.

There’s only a week left until Halloween! In addition to the #VERYSCARY series, we’ll be featuring some capsule reviews this week of some of the spookier books that have come out this year to get you prepped for the best day of the year.

#WeekofSpoop: Welcome to Night Vale was last modified: October 25th, 2015 by Quincy Rhoads

Could the pocket-sized volume of poetry be the most important political statement in the debate for art’s universal appeal? Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems—and the rest of “The Pocket Poets Series,” really—certainly vied for the necessity of a teensy book of verse to accompany lunch. Cameron Pierce’s newest book, The Incoming Tide, is a slim volume of poetry and lyrical essays about Pierce’s fishing adventures, his life in Astoria, and his transition into domestic life and fatherhood, and it’s an excellent lunchtime companion, too.

Pierce has been publishing a slew of fish-themed books this year, but The Incoming Tide marks a high point in his writing career. The collection maintains the sincere weirdness of his excellent story collection Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon while distancing itself from the bizarro moniker so firmly branded across his previous books. And, sure, there’s an essay about an experience with a haunted lawnmower, poems referring to “the skeleton hands of aliens,” and there’s a firm skull motif throughout, but, for the most part, reality is a far more constant feature in this collection than in Pierce’s previous work. “Up [on XXX Creek] there exists a futuristic world where trout outnumber people,” Pierce writes. “That’s my kind of science fiction.”

The reverence he holds for fish and fishermen alike, the reverence for “the personal narratives that develop” while a fisherman goes about his job and how fishing is “about… how a fish fights—and just as importantly, how you fight the fish,” is contagious. I’ve never been a fan of fishing, and yet, I yearn to fish after reading Pierce’s collection, I long to go with him and his friends to dig clams, and, most of all, I wish he and his wife really would open up a Richard Brautigan-themed restaurant. But I suppose taking The Incoming Tide, with its faux-distressed cover—as if begging to be dog-eared and shoved in a back pocket or, more appropriately, a tackle box—along with me and reading it over and over will just have to do for now.

The Incoming Tide was last modified: October 21st, 2015 by Quincy Rhoads

Publishing Genius Press is finally putting out a new comic book, and it’s amazing. The Well-Dressed Bear Will (Never) Be Found by Jarod Roseló is about a bear that can’t finish reading Italo Calvino for all of the wrong numbers ringing in on his landline telephone. As the calls progress, demanding to speak with Jonathan, what begins as a cute comics premise unmoors itself as Roseló explores what it means to define and defend your own identity in demanding, but otherwise uncaring world.

The Well-Dressed Bear… hits that perfect timbre of literary surrealism while still feeling like a funny book. This is a feat that’s rarely pulled off in the medium, but Roseló’s art—like Roman Dirge weighed down with existential dread—and story accomplish a sophistication that feels more literary and less comix biff-pow. Please check it out. We need more books that inhabit the liminal space between literature and comix.

Jarod Roseló’s The Well-Dressed Bear Will (Never) Be Found was last modified: September 3rd, 2015 by Quincy Rhoads

Remember Napoleon Dynamite? I really connected with that movie when it came out. It’s a film all about the nerd winning acceptance from his peers and finding love, or so my seventeen-year-old self thought until a friend pointed out how much of an asshole the eponymous character is in that movie.

Take the infamous liger scene, for example. This girl is actually trying to forge a genuine connection with ND and he shuts her down with his air of superiority. Of course this is a defense mechanism. I know it all too well as I’ve been on both sides of exchanges like this one. Napoleon is misunderstood, so he’s built up this air of superiority as a defensive coping mechanism. He’s rejecting others to avoid the sting of others rejecting him. He does it throughout the entire movie, too.

Dakota McFadzean’s Last Mountain 2 takes this concept of nerd superiority qua defense mechanism and develops it further with the issue’s main short story, “Buzzy.” McFadzean uses a clean, rounded pencil style printed in teal and black risograph on cream-colored paper creating an esthetic that’s reminiscent of Daniel Clowes by way of Nancy to depict his take on the new kid at school narrative. Danny is the newest fifth grader and he oscillates between sympathetic and combative, as he plays by himself in the schoolyard then kicks rocks and tells the other boys in the class to “FUCK OFF!” His classmate Jennifer notices him and tries to reach out to him, but Danny relies so heavily upon his sense of superiority that he just pushes her further away.

Welcome to Enclave

Welcome to Enclave, a community blog and internet space where the literary community can share their enthusiasm for literary & non-literary ideas, fiction, poetry, film, music, current events, and other forms of creative culture. Enclave’s contributors represent different literary communities, corners, and aesthetics but share one thing in common: the desire to express themselves openly, urgently, and without a shred of dishonesty. At Enclave, we are artists looking to share our passion for creativity and formal expression. We hope you’ll stick around. Strike up a conversation. We’re all coping here.